Microsoft has open sourced and cross platformed .NET. The demonstration was great, and for anyone that uses Node and NPM the use is almost identical. It's a command line tool first, with GUI tooling built around it and many of the commands are very similar.

For example the speaker ran one command that built a web project, it took a few seconds and had a fully functional MVC web application, including a gulpfile, a package.json and a bower.json including BootStrap. Like Node it has a web server so just running the build command launches the site in your browser. It even had authentication ready to go.

I don't know if any of you are interested in ASP.NET development, but I just wanted to relate some of the cool things MS are doing in the community and how they're taking cues from other open source projects.

Oh, did I mention that apparently .NET Core is a lot faster than Node? He showed some independent stats that has it ranked as the 8th fastest framework (not sure framework is the right term here) and that same set of stats has Node ranked 80th. It was just released in July and v1.0.0 is capable of 313,000 requests per second ._. Like I said, cools stuff and maybe a glimpse of a future where MS becomes relevant in the development world again.

Excellent summary, particularly the performance piece. Do you know if running .NET Core on *nix if you can take advantage of the rich ecosystem of libraries or if you can run popular frameworks/CMSs, like Umbraco?

Umbraco is looking at v9 to run on dotnet core, they're currently on v 7.25

It's something that's very tempting to play with, especially given my current Windows environment, but there is so much I still have to learn with the technologies I'm using daily that it doesn't seem like a good idea right now.